Radeon HD 5970: the current king of the pixel hill

AMD has officially unveiled the ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, which currently sits on top of the company’s performance scale. The graphics card runs dual GPU chips for a total of 4.3 billion 40nm transistors and GDDR5 memory for the highest-end of high-end performance, and features 3200 stream processing units and 160 texture units, as well as support for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.2.

All the specs make for graphics performance that should be equal to a pair of HD 5850 GPUs linked in a Crossfire configuration, although the HD 5970 can be further boosted by another 5970 (via CrossfireX) for a total of 4 GPUs. The new GPU also supports AMD/ATI’s technologies such as Stream technology, Avivo HD, and Eyefinity for multi-display setups.

The HD 5970 is available now through ATI’s partners for around $599.